Other people’s dreams are never interesting…except when they’re about sex. Each week, our dream analyst Lauri Loewenberg tells one lucky reader what their dirty dream means. Got a dream you want Lauri to analyze? Click here to submit it (18 and older only, please). This week, a reader asks Lauri:

I dreamt that an attacker entered my apartment when I had the front door open talking to another holiday maker and feeling at ease. He then attacked my friend with a knife, stabbing her in the ribs and then cutting her upwards in her private area. I didn’t know whether to get her to jump out of the windows with me, but strangely I knew we were many floors up and the windows were large and had been slid open across the glass. I worried actually he may have got in that way, not the front door as I had castigated myself for. In not making a decision what to do — fight, flee, protect her — he comes for me and cuts me up my private area. There is no pain, just disbelief and then I fear on waking and shaking in my bedroom, if I turn on the light, he will attack me again but I know I have to, to prove this isn’t real.

Lauri: It seems that, through this dream, you are coming to terms with an unpleasant reality… a reality you don’t want to believe is true. The open door and open windows suggest you have opened yourself up to someone in real life; you unwittingly allowed someone into your personal world, perhaps even into your heart and they, in turn, have now become a threat to your peace of mind.

The friend in this dream, I believe, represents the friendship between you and this person you let into your life who now feels like an intruder rather than a friend. The intruder stabbing your friend in the ribs makes me think that perhaps that someone has been taking verbal stabs at you and ribbing you to the point that you are feeling emotionally wounded and victimized.

Getting sliced upwards from the vagina, while eerily reminiscent of Jack the Ripper, suggests this may have been an intimate relationship you are now feeling wounded by. Whatever the case, the cutting in the dream is telling you that you must face the reality that you need to sever — cut this relationship out of your life.